"There's meat, I'll wager!" cried Jack, pointing to several objects on a table. They looked like chunks of beef, but when Mark struck them with the end of his life-torch they gave forth a sound as if a rock had been tapped.
"What did I tell you?" Mark asked, "Nothing but rocks. And the bread is also a stone," he added bitterly.
"You're right," admitted Jack, with a sigh. "And I'm getting hungrier than ever." They all were. For days they had been without sufficient food, and now, when it was almost within their reach, they were denied it by this curious trick of nature. With pale and wan faces they gazed at each other, wetting their parched lips, for they had some time since taken the last of their scant supply of water, and they were very thirsty.
"I guess it's all up with us," murmured Mark. "We'll soon be like these poor people here—blocks of stone."
"If we only could change this meat back into it's original shape," spoke Jack musingly, smiting his fist against a block of beef.
Suddenly Andy uttered a cry.
"I have it!" he fairly shouted.
"What?" asked Jack.
"I have a plan to get meat out of this hunk of stone!"
The two boys gazed at the old hunter as though they thought he had lost his reason, but, chuckling gleefully, Andy took from his pouch several cartridges, and proceeded to remove the wads, and pour the powder from the paper shells out on the stone table.